and a powerful explosion rocks a small community leaving behind death and destruction coming up the sights and sounds out of west texas. plus a day of prayer to remember the victims president obama attends an interface service to honor the victims of the boston marathon attack this as the f.b.i. appears no closer to finding out who is responsible for the explosion an update from boston straight ahead. plus it's back lawmakers in the house give the go ahead to the controversial cybersecurity bill but white house value the white house value to veto it later in the show what's in the system bill and why you should be concerned about your internet freedoms. is thursday april eighteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm megan lopez and you are watching r.t. we begin in texas where a major blast at

a fertilizer plant literally decimated half the town there are facilities from the fatalities from this incident but the exact number of people is currently unknown upwards of one hundred sixty people have been injured three to four firefighters and one police officer who responded to the explosion are still missing and the search for the blast happened at eight pm eastern time in the town of west texas at the west fertilizer company this is a small farming town with about twenty seven hundred residents this town is located just about twenty miles north of waco texas now amazingly last night's blast was actually caught on multiple cameras so let's take a look at some of those incredible sights and sounds. sure the. authorities were called to the plant more than half an hour before the explosion actually occurred because of

a fire in the factory evacuations of the surrounding area had already begun and not a moment too soon as you just saw well i want to give you for some perspective on just how far reaching this blast really was it decimated a five block radius toppling between fifty to seventy five homes in the process take a look at this the explosion was so powerful that a seismograph in texas which is over four hundred miles away detected it it was so big it registered as a two point one magnitude earlier i was joined by r.t. correspondent ramon glendower in west texas who fills us in on the aftermath. exactly megan well what we have here is still several police departments from around texas cordoned off a large area around the fertilizer plant which exploded last night at about seven thirty local time now we've been getting briefed briefings periodically from the mayor and from local law enforcement i just came back from one of the local

hospitals which i admitted nearly one hundred people who were injured in the explosion last night overall we know that more than one hundred sixty people were hurt in that blast right now there have been compare and tell us how ever having gotten a new casualty count recently given the fact that this is still a search and rescue mission some of these first responders to get through the rubble this morning still hoping to find survivors in a neighborhood which has been described as a war zone the mayor called said that it looked like a nuclear bomb had been dropped on his town now ramon i understand that you actually visited one of the hospitals that is hosting a lot of these victims today what did you have a chance to speak with any of them and how were they describing the scene. right well we did speak to one woman earlier who was slightly wounded during the

explosion she lived in the vicinity of the blast when she saw the smoke she tried to run towards the senior center knowing that there were tons of seniors there then that's when another blast came and blew her away she was forced to run away with her children but this morning when we talked to her she was so emotionally distraught her family was ok but so many of her friends she did not know the whereabouts and we have to remember that this is a town of twenty six hundred people many people here know each other many people know a lot of these first responders who are still not accounted for this evening here in texas so. a lot of tense moments for the residents here just by. people not just the police and the fire department the police department came out and told us that it is the civilians that live in this town who should also be considered heroes who also ran towards the fire in hopes of helping to save some of

their neighbors and ramon as you were just speaking about it was people in waco that came in as i had reported earlier waco is quite a distance away one of the remarkable things about the boston marathon bombing is how quickly the victims were able to get medical care seeing as possum has some of the best facilities in the country as well as equipment that is already that was already set up for the runners meanwhile west texas is twenty miles away from the nearest hospital so how authorities astonied to this catastrophic incident and helping the victims. in this is a very small town with only a few ambulances and some of the people who work in this town for these emergency services were caught up in the blast itself so hundreds of first responders from throughout texas were able to show up immediately a tree was set up last night behind one of the local community centers on the football field and on the baseball field in the couple of hours that it took to

drive from austin to here that had been cleared and more than one hundred people had been sent to a local hospital so definitely speaks very highly about the preparedness and the cooperation that we've seen here in central texas amongst first responders and finally ramon very quickly any indication on what caused this explosion. and. absolutely right now the un investigation is still underway the a.t.f. the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms is taking part in the investigation as a criminal investigation higher. they do not want to say that it was an intentional explosion or something was said there intentionally we have to remember that fertilizer is very volatile and has been using explosives before so it is a dangerous. however the investigation is still underway for the root cause

meanwhile the police and fire fighters are still searching the rubble near the fertilizer plant r.t. correspondent ramon glinda working hard for us in west texas thank you so. let's turn now to boston where investigators are still trying to piece together the events that led up to the explosions at the boston marathon and actually track down those who are responsible for the bombings the f.b.i. is in the process of locating two men seen in at least one video at the boston marathon at this point homeland security secretary janet napolitano hesitated to call these men suspects but she actually expressed interest in interviewing the men i was joined earlier by r.t. correspondent on the stasi a charkha who filled us in on the latest from the boston marathon. major that's certainly the question on everybody's mind certainly you know the bombings took place monday this is there is a here and people are expecting some kind of tension will results to be announced of course yesterday there was a little bit of panic surrounding a possible arrest as we know was the media here started reporting that possibly one

arrest has been made that was later reiterated and definitely people are getting impatient to find out exactly who was behind these bombings but unfortunately we are nowhere closer as of today as of right now in terms of whether or not the f.b.i. is closer to finding the man or several people behind these bombings we're still questioning and wondering whether or not it's going to turn out to have been an individual or group a domestic or foreign attack certainly waiting to find that out even though our reporters are being promised that the investigation is moving ahead every hour they're getting somewhere closer so far there have been no tangible announcements made as you mentioned officials are considering to possible men and surveillance videos but really this is something that's very much up in the air we do know that they are considering thousands of videos including a week before the bombings took place using all the surveillance video they can lay their hands on and certainly right now oh they are not close to being up to

announcing who could have been behind this attack from what we know now on a software you just brought something up and something that has been brought up in numerous media outlets the new york post today has a feature cover featuring two alleged suspects what has happened to those men and are they still is still suspects. you know nobody is yet using the word suspect there is certainly talk of two men with backpacks that we're seeing somewhere around the finishing line at the boston marathon but you know there's really a lot of speculation at this point especially when it comes to the media you know there is a footage out there for us as we know the bombs are said to have been made at home homemade devices and officials are saying that the bombs were likely place in backpacks and then later put in garbage cans so you know a lot of talk about backpacks certainly when there's a certain picture of people holding one there's a lot of discussion of you know whether or not the backpack looks suspicious is it reason enough to look into that particular person so certainly this is being talked

about but the word suspects are not being used as of yet on a stuffy i understand that president obama today went to him multi-faith service commemorating the victims of the boston marathon bombing and giving a speech that he used to use the marathon to actually as a metaphor to compare that to american presidents present recurrence can you tell us a little bit more about this morning service. well you know it was definitely an emotional time people living here in boston were certainly looking forward to some kind of consolation and they did in fact get that the president was here the president of united states was here to address the people living here in boston and people throughout the united states concerned with this latest tragedy and certainly he gave a very hard heartfelt speech and did meet with the victims' families and you know tried to do what he could on his part to make people feel better and i guess safer because of the situation because certainly this is something that was never

expected or could have been predicted in this in this kind of picture perfect city megan now i also understand. yesterday was not the proudest day for our colleagues over at c.n.n. as well that fox news both of them reported that an arrest has definitely taken place and then they actually backtracked within the hour. while this confusion and did you see any direct consequences of this false reporting on the streets of boston. well yes megan you know that was definitely quite amusing and we did see this unravel in front of our very eyes when reports started coming out of c.n.n. saying that there was an arrest made there were quoting there special forces only within you know literally minutes after blowing this up into breaking news that one arrest was finally made to backtrack and you know they had a guest on who said well actually we can confirm with much better sources that no such arrest as been made on the f.b.i. was scheduled to hold a press conference yesterday on wednesday which they ended up canceling. reportedly because this false information started coming out in terms of whether or not this

affected people here in boston probably not they were probably some kind of full hope that finally this investigation has moved closer to finding who was behind the attacks but certainly there was some concerns that this could have been misleading before for the investigation itself and for certainly the whoever is behind the attack in terms of their further their further steps and them being closer to tracking this person down are to correspondent honest officer to our reporting in boston. well bizarre new developments in the incident that put the white house on high alert and cause numerous evacuations on capitol hill yesterday authorities have now arrested and charged a man believed to have sent two suspicious letters to president obama and republican senator roger wicker forty five year old paul kevin curtis was arrested by f.b.i. officials in his home in chorus mississippi last night mr carus is somewhat of a celebrity in his hometown he and his brother are famous for their elvis impersonation film police may well see for yourself.

he also does buddy holly johnny cash and prince in person ations now paul kevin curtis has made his intentions of four letters very clear he believes he uncovered a conspiracy to sell human body parts on the black market he also claims that the f.b.i. and various parties within the government are trying to ruin his reputation and are using drones to spy on him and yet another strange twist it turns out that senator worker actually confirmed today he actually hired mr curtis to do impersonations at a party that he and his wife were hosting just a few years back an additional letter was sent to miss mississippi judge earlier this week the letters the letters tested positive for a poisonous substance known as rice in now that is a substance that's actually derived from castor oil castor plants that's the same.

plant that's actually used to make castor oil there is no known antidote to rice in and it is extremely deadly when it is and hailed the letter did not actually reach the hands of the president or the senator mr curtis is big diagnosed with has been diagnosed in the past with bipolar disorder his attorneys are maintaining his innocence they have not yet decided whether to seek a hearing to determine his mental state now if convicted mr curtis could spend anywhere between five and fifteen years in federal prison. still ahead on our congress votes on this will go inside this cybersecurity bill when we come back. below potentially deadly blizzard taking aim for the northeast it's expected to hit starting in a few hours from new york to maine we have team coverage of the storm. we're watching is the very heavy snow building into boston properly or today it was very sticky you can see it start to become much more time to read. the line there's

still a lot of snow out here at least. snowball fight. decent is going to pretty incredible day there and even record snowfall throughout much of a life. of emergency. thank. you for that. i don't. know what. to do if you've never seen anything like this.

while it's thursday and that means it's time for the tech report on the agenda for today the cyber intelligence sharing protection act better known as cispa now just today the bill passed through the house of representatives two hundred eighty eight to one hundred twenty seven it's now on its way to the senate for about this bill is causing a bitter divide between capitol hill and also it's causing a better design in silicon valley computer giants like i.b.m. and intel have lobbied hard in support of the bill while among right and advice advocacy groups like the electronic frontier foundation have all voiced concerns over the privacy rights this bill issues now even the president is weighing in in a letter to congress the white house threatened to veto the bill in its current

form to talk more about this tangled web i was joined earlier by sharon bradford franklin she's a senior counsel at the constitution project and i asked her what this legislation would mean about the average person and what it should and could mean for our personal web use. well the problem is that the bill that was passed today by the house does not include adequate safeguards to prevent private companies from sharing your personal information with the government and the basic approach of the bill is to promote information sharing between private sector and the government and the basic concept of that is fine as long as we do have robust safeguards built into the bill and unfortunately we did not get that with this book now let me ask you this this bill in its current form it says that it wants private companies as it promotes cooperation it asks private companies to share their information but it does not force them what does that mean that's correct it is voluntary for

companies to send information to the government but it creates a huge incentive system because it provides broad scale immunity from liability when companies do share that information with the federal government and in fact the breath of the immunity provisions is another key problem with this but because companies now if they act in good faith are immune for their information sharing even if they engage in some behaviors that may be reckless or without any kind of reasonable planning involves well let's talk about that liability let's talk about that what does that encompass what exactly can these companies get away with and how little effect us and how we use the internet. well the way the bill structured it imposes all of their karmas on the government once it receives information to protect our rights and that is really troubling is we do want to make sure that companies have to play a role here in avoiding sending in your personal information to the government on the breath of the immunity includes protection for any decisions made based on

cyber security purposes and that's a very broad term it can come as a whole lot of activity including as i mentioned some that may be reckless if they perceive there's a cyber attack and they want to take action based on that. now as i understand sr it essentially overrides a lot of the current laws that we have intact including the electronic communications privacy act for instance considering all those laws a lot of those laws haven't actually been updated since the eighty's is this a way to kind of shortcut and get around actually updating those laws by just passing fifa no i wouldn't say that and we still do have important efforts to try to mend those laws the concern where the structure the bill says notwithstanding any other law is that it trumps any existing privacy protections and safeguards in that regard that are already in place and that's why we want to make sure that the provisions within the bill are sufficiently robust one key problem of course is it

does not have a provision that we had hoped for an amendment that would require companies to make reasonable efforts to strip out information that could be used to identify a specific person underlay to the cyber threat and companies have testified before congress that this is something they can do and i have to ask you about another thing that kind of sparked my interest and that is that this bill actually allows for the or is the critics of the bill are actually asking for the bill to be able to allow for this information to first go to some kind of civilian organization like the department of homeland security before us dispersed to other agencies like the n.s.a. for instance so from your perspective what what does that do what will that help when this information is going out in general well the provision you just mentioned that's actually one good thing that did happen very last minute we got an amendment that was introduced on the floor it was not one that was originally passed through by the rules committee for a vote that does help on this problem of maintaining civilian control under that

new provision if companies want to come under the liability protection immunity protections they can only give the information directly to either part of the department homeland security or if it's relates to a crime to the department of justice. and how will that hello to protect us even more because the central image that more people have our information essentially well it helps protect us because it maintains a civilian agency at the hub as the one that receives any information coming from our private civilian networks in peacetime so that is a big improvement and that was a key concern for us now of course the bill does require that the prime homeland security and part of justice then set up rules to pass through information in real time to other agencies including of course the n.s.a. but they will have to do that with policies and procedures in place that hopefully at least through automated ways can help minimize the personal information that is passed through to those other agencies so more regulation and we have a little bit of time left i have to ask you about the money the lobbying efforts

that are actually going into this kind of thing now i know on monday i.b.m. sent over two hundred executives to d.c. in order to lobby for this bill and as a result thirty six new coast co-sponsors we can't say if those two are exactly correlated but thirty six new co-sponsors actually join us but what does this say anything about outside interest playing a role on capitol hill well it's a good question there certainly is some indication of that there also i do have to give some credit to the bill's sponsors for making some of these improvements this one that we just discussed about civilian control being an important one but of course it didn't get far enough and we still need to have much more robust safeguards for privacy rights and hopefully that will come through the senate if this bill does continue sharon bradford franklin senior counsel at the constitution project thank you so much for weighing in on this thank you very much and now the latest on a story we've been covering in-depth here on r.t. the transpacific partnership it is a u.s. led of free trade agreement that involves the countries you see on this map here in southeast asia as well as in south america one new country is looking to join and

that being japan the united states just approved japan to become one of its partners a move that still needs partner nations australia canada new zealand and of. peru to go ahead and get the go ahead other countries have already agreed so what is the t p p while the trade agreement described by a public citizens as the north american free trade agreements on steroids is actually really shrouded in secrecy so it's hard to determine that but what we do know is that the partnership would involve nearly forty percent of the world's economy and has been in negotiations since the bush administration and it is currently one of president obama's top administrative priorities t.p.k. rules would override any national laws including those regarding internet freedom the production of. pharmaceuticals as well as environmental and financial regulations and it would also do much much more earlier i was joined by stan so

sure he's a labor representative at the professional aerospace union and he explained to us his stance on trade negotiations. a lot of times you kind of suggested this in the way you friend the question a lot of times it comes across as free trade versus protectionism and my union for instance where in the earth space industry we're one hundred percent in favor of trade everybody i know is in favor of trade we make products the rest world wants to buy so the issue for us is is having a good trade policy or a bad trade policy and i think we would know a good trade policy i think all of us do a good trade policy is one that raises our standard of living and so i think that's kind of the way we look at it we have always looked at these trade agreements as you know what do they do for workers and families and communities do they bring prosperity which is the promise of free trade or are they really you know deindustrializing our economy and shipping jobs overseas and. making

you know a weaker economic future that that's really the test i think and it's not just unions who feel this way this is really something that you get across civil society i was quite surprised to see that as explained to me it was from by the koreans the japanese understand it this way. in europe they understand it this way these agreements are not so much about trade as the way we express our social values so every organization civil society i think has a very strong stake in this now sand the tipping close the creation of tribunals to deal with disagreements between national laws and foreign firms how does that work and isn't bad for regular citizens. well. as a very interesting question you know we think of a tribunals we think of justice and courts as something that have a lot of legitimacy this is very important to our social fabric these trade tribunals are very different they're not like our courts they're the decisions are

made by trade lawyers who have day jobs being you know employed by trading companies and organizations involved in trade they have no public responsibility they're not accountable to anybody so well expressed the interests that are set up in these tribunals and the way the trade agreements work the highest interest is maximum possible trade and investor right so that's what these tribunals are going to be all about so if the province of quebec wants to study fracking and suspend fracking as a public policy issue. when that goes to the trade tribunals that's now one of the high priorities public interest is not a high priority for the trade tribunal they're going to be thinking about investor interest because that's what's written in a trade agreements and finalized and we have a very very short amount of time left can you break down for me specifically how this is going to hurt your business well that's an interesting question is that

going to hurt our business it's going to hurt our communities and our families and workers businesses are going to do very well their interests are being served when it comes to sharing the gains from trade most of those gains which is what we've seen most of those gains go to investors in multinational trading companies and who will be at a disadvantage here are the environment human rights labor rights public health and for the financial regulation all those interests of civil society they will they will have a much lower priority then i'm going to have to cut you off their stance or share from the professional aerospace union. well maybe your mother told you to check the public toilet seat before you sit down but here's a new one for you make sure you check the bathroom for hidden cameras as well back on march twentieth a student at glen burnie high school in maryland found what looked like a camera inside of the bathroom the baltimore sun reported that a fourteen year veteran of the an original county police department installed the

cameras in the men's room without notifying other police officials or the school yesterday and police announced that no criminal charges would be filed against the officer why because technically he broke no rules no criminal laws were broken when the officer placed the hidden camera in the bathroom police said the camera didn't record or store any sound or images the camera isn't the only thing that's hidden about the story though so is the motive why place a camera in the bathroom in the first place another hidden subject who the police officer is the identity of the policemen was not actually released by police officials now the officer is currently on paid administrative leave although that is only a temporary measure the officer is also the subject to an internal affairs investigation which will hopefully explain the lingering questions about this strange washroom

incidents and that's going to do it for now but for if you missed any of part of these shows today you are in luck we post all of our interviews online insults go to youtube dot com slash r t america and for the latest and greatest information coming out from around your world check out our website. u.s.a. you can also follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez don't forgive to leave your comments and story. i think. if. wealthy british soil.